A U.S. court of appeals has struck down the Environmental Protection Agency's latest regulation of America's coal industry.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled 2-1 Tuesday that the agency overstepped its legal authority with the cross-state air pollution policy. The rule sought to limit dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from power plants in 29 states.

Coal miners consider the ruling a win for their industry, which has struggled to get investor support for new technology that could help pave the way toward energy independence for the United States.

"It's got a long history and people rely on that history to refer to it as a dirty fossil fuel, and you do. You get your hands black when you touch it, and it's dusty," West Virginia Coal Association President Bill Raney said.

"But we've learned how to control the dust and you know we're getting better every day at that," he added.

In West Virginia, developers of the Adams Fork Energy Plant say converting coal into liquid fuel could ultimately help lower rising gas prices.

Their goal is to produce 250 million gallons of methanol that could also be used for gas, jet fuel, diesel fuel, and more.

Republican Sen. James Inhofe, a vocal opponent of the EPA, applauded the ruling.

"The Obama-EPA continues to demonstrate that it will stop at nothing in its determination to kill coal," Reuters quoted the Oklahoma lawmaker. "With so much economic pain in store, it is fortunate that EPA [regulation] was sent back to the drawing board."

Oklahoma joined Nebraska, Florida, Texas, Alabama, South Carolina and Virginia to file the lawsuit against the EPA in September after Oklahoma was required to follow a new federal plan to reduce pollution in another state.

“The EPA violated the law and went against decades of precedent in denying states like Oklahoma the right to create a state solution. If allowed to stand, the cross-state pollution rule would have required Oklahoma to spend millions of dollars to retrofit power plants to address theoretical compliance issues in one county in Michigan,” Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt said.

“This regulation is yet another example of the current EPA administration’s activist approach to environmental policy and burdensome overregulation that accomplishes nothing more than harming ratepayers and businesses for the sake of more rule making. Thankfully, the court agreed with our position and validated our efforts.”

As I looked into this I also found:

In Tuesdays opinion, the court ruled the “EPA’s Transport Rule violates the statute” and “did not allow the States the initial opportunity to implement the required reductions with respect to sources within their borders.”

In doing so, the court wrote, “the EPA departed from its consistent prior approach” and “violated the (Clean Air) Act. For each of those two independent reasons, EPA’s Transport Rule violates federal law. Therefore, the Rule must be vacated.”

The Bush administration’s “Clean Air Interstate Rule” — a predecessor to the cross-state rule that the court struck down in 2008 for not requiring enough of some states — will remain in effect while the EPA goes back to the drawing board, the court decided.